Track of the Cat

In 1954 William Wellman, along with his cinematographer, William H. Clothier, tried an experiment. They filmed a color film in black and white. Except for a vivid red mackinaw jacket and a woman's yellow scarf, all the color was drained from Track of the Cat, and the setting, the snow and pine trees of the Sierra Nevada mountains, were in shot stark white and black. Wellman later thought the film something of a failure, mainly because no one noticed what he had done.

Beyond the color experiment, Track of the Cat is an interesting picture. It's a very moody combination of a Eugene O'Neill play, Moby-Dick, and a Western. The very small cast are the members of the Bridges family, who operate a cattle ranch in California at about the turn of the twentieth century. The middle brother of three, played by Robert Mitchum, is the dominant one, running things with an iron will and a sarcastic sneer. The older brother, William Hopper, is more sensitive and artistic, and the much younger brother, Tab Hunter, is in love with a young woman and by marrying hopes to break out of the dysfunction of the family.

The power behind Mitchum is his mother, villainously played by Beulah Bondi, who is both cruel and manipulative. The father, Phillip Tonge, is a hopeless drunk, and a spinster sister, Teresa Wright, is bitter and full of regret and urges Hunter to leave the home.

This is the backdrop for the story that is set off by the presence of a large panther, which is killing the Bridges' stock. Mitchum and Hopper set out to hunt him, but when Mitchum returns for supplies, Hopper is killed by the cat. Mitchum then sets off on an Ahab-like vendetta against the beast, which over the course of the film attains a mythic status (we never see the cat, which is described as large as a horse). Hovering around the edges is a mysterious elderly Indian (bizarrely played by Carl Switzer--yes, Alfalfa from Little Rascals) who at one point suggests that the panther is a representation of the whole world.

The film is adapted from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who also wrote The Ox-Bow Incident, and drips with literary trappings (at one point a book of poems by John Keats plays a key role). The scenes inside the home have some of the staginess of a play, with the characters having their big speeches, as well as some comedy--Tonge has hid bottles of whiskey all over the place. But Wellman keeps things lively with his camera work, and also includes some menacing shots, such as a long take shot from the bottom of a grave.